1. Technical Field of the Invention
This invention relates to calendar and scheduling. More particularly, it relates to integrating project events with personal calendar and scheduling clients.
2. Background Art
A problem in the art relating to calendar and scheduling (C&S) applications is the repetitive visitation of different place calendars required in order to keep track of calendar events throughout different projects or places.
The same problem has been identified by others, but their solution has been to develop procedures which require the user to download/upload and synchronize the events into/from their calendars. Examples: Yahoo calendaring (www.yahoo.com), Palm Pilot calendaring (www.mypalm.com). However, none of these have developed a seamless integration where the project events are received in the same manner as when a colleague invites a person to a meeting within the organization's information infrastructure (as is done with email and C&S applications such as Notes/Domino, Outlook/Exchange).
There is a need in the art for a different solution, one where once a user has subscribed to a Place calendar there is no need for the user to synchronize or download any calendar event information. The user automatically receives calendar invitations through email in the same manner as when receiving other meeting invitations.
It is known for projects, such as those managed by an IBM® Lotus® QuickPlace® server, to create e-mails about content. However, there is a need for a system and method for formatting such events in a project calendar as Notes 5 meetings, Notes 6 meetings, Outlook events, and any icalendar enabled client.
Icalendar is an open standard calendaring protocol. (See RFC 2445.) According to that protocol, the following fields are specified for sharing information among calendar & scheduling (C&S) programs:                STARTTIME:        ENDTIME:        DURATION:        LOCATION:        ATTENDEES        SUBJECT        CHAIR        LANGUAGE        . . .        
Domino, IBM, the IBM Logo, Lotus, Notes, QuickPlace are trademarks of International Business Machines in the United States, other countries, or both. Microsoft and Microsoft Outlook are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.